staycavara.com is live

staycavara.com is live.

It's the first version, so calibrate accordingly. Right now it explains what Cavara is, who it's for, and it has a newsletter tab so signing up doesn't require the scavenger hunt it used to. That's the whole scope. But it's the piece everything else eventually hangs on, so I want to tell you why a simple site is the thing I'm most fired up about this week.

Every booking I take on Airbnb or VRBO belongs to Airbnb or VRBO. Not the stay. The guest. I don't get their email. I can ask why they're coming, but only after they've already booked, and only by messaging them one at a time and hoping they answer. By then they've made every decision about the trip. On my own site I can ask during checkout, when they're still planning, and actually do something with it. The tenth anniversary. The surprise she spent months putting together. The trip they've been trying to take for three years. That's the difference between a stay I concierge and a stay I just clean for. And when they leave, the OTA is the one who gets to reach them for the next one.

One of my mentors frames it as: you're building a demand engine or you're building the OTAs' database. Somebody's getting the guest list either way. That's the version that stuck with me.

Then there's the money. OTAs charge hosts 15 to 18 percent. Earlier this year Airbnb moved from a split fee, 12 percent on the guest and 3 on the host, to hosts paying all of it. Overnight that became a line on my financials I have to plan around. The operators I've been learning from all built past it the same way, by owning their own demand. One of them runs roughly 80 percent direct. That's not a marketing stat. That's margin that stays in the business.

But the reason I actually care isn't the fee. It's that the guest experience doesn't start at check-in.

It starts the second someone sees us on Instagram. Everything between that moment and checkout is the stay. Which means if booking means opening four tabs, bouncing between three sites, and hunting for a checkout button, I've already told them something about how this place runs. Every click is a chance to give up. Frictionless isn't a conversion tactic, it's hospitality that happens to start early.

So the site becomes the front door, where the people on this list get first word on opening dates. Then it becomes the booking engine. Every ad, every reel, every email points at one place. One decision.

Now the part I didn't expect

I built it in an afternoon. I have no technical background. I used Claude Code, described what I wanted, and it wrote every line. A designer would have run me thousands of dollars and several weeks, and the site is going to change constantly as this business changes, so that's thousands more and several more weeks every time. Instead I spot the change and prompt it.

I'm still not totally over that. More on how I'm using AI across this business soon, because the website is the least of it.

More soon,

Jeremy